My utterly fictitious and sloppily forged "absent" notes in middle school were more believable than this:
Although Mitt Romney was supposed to visit Orlando on Monday, the campaign announced late Sunday that the presumed Republican presidential nominee was too exhausted to make the trip.
Evidently the malodorous blowback of Romney's veep pick is just now hitting his nostrils.
It's stunning. It is indescribably stunning. After Andrea Saul's epic stumble last week, I suspected that Romney would quickly recalculate and reconsider Ryan, but I never believed he'd actually take the plunge. That he did, however, reconfigures not merely the presidential campaign, but the GOP's future. The Republican Party is now officially the party of Medicare's annihilation and Social Security's privatization; it has firmly grabbed hold of the powerfully electrified third rails of American politics; and it will, if the Dems play their cards right, emerge--barely--as a smoldering, charred shell of a party in 2013.
This may seem like a contradiction, but that is not to predict that the GOP will experience a November collapse. The odds of a Republican House and Senate gains remain, I should think, roughly intact. The wheels of demolition often grind slowly in American politics. But the countdown to detonation has begun. The GOP has finally maxed out its ideological madness. It can, simply put, morph no crazier than it already is. Which is to say, it can no longer march forward. It can only retreat. And it must do so with a demographically dying base.
Following Romney's crushing defeat, the firebreathers will of course blame Mitt Romney: he was never conservative enough, he wasn't vicious enough, he wasn't inspiring enough, he wasn't, let's say, Santorum enough, and so on. But every sober strategic breath will be whispering: We need to make another plan--now.
Then the fireworks will really begin. Or so I suspect.